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The skinny on Trump's medical report or The long and the short of the President's height

Posted Wednesday night, January 17, 2018.

It'd be one thing if he was lying about his height and his weight out of simple vanity. But he's lying for the same reason used car salesmen used to roll back the odometer. To sell his customers a lemon.

Photo up top and one similar to it, both taken on Trump’s inauguration day, are making the rounds online, with folks claiming they show that Trump, who says he’s six foot three, is clearly not two inches taller than President Obama, who is six-one. In the photos, Trump looks to be the same height as Obama if not an inch shorter. I don’t see it.

What I see is a photo---the one at top---of Barack Obama standing just a bit in front of Trump on the step so that he can look past him to say something to Melania while Trump leans a little forward and to his left, either to catch what Obama is saying or getting ready with to say something himself. The photo is taken at an angle too, from the right of center. No good photographer likes to take a picture straight on. This and his own positioning puts Obama in the forefront, not by much, but enough to make him appear to be the tallest figure in the group. In short, Trump’s looking shorter than he is is probably a trick of perspective.

Add to this there are plenty of other photographs showing him with other tall people, including some with Obama, in which he is clearly taller than everyone else in the photo. And he has a tendency to stoop and to hunch. He has another tendency to lower his head and tuck his chin in. Obama tends to stand with his his back straight and head up. That’s what he’s doing in the photo. Trump isn’t.

But maybe Trump isn’t really six-three. Maybe his doctor lied. Maybe he wore his shoes when he was measured. Maybe he stood on tiptoe. But maybe he really believes he is. Leaving aside, on the one hand, that’s what his medical report says he is and, on the other, the man lies with every breath, he might have been six foot three once upon a time, when he was young, and he isn’t aware that he might very well have lost an inch or two or even three in height as he advanced into his old age. Or maybe he knows it and won’t let himself admit it because he won’t let himself admit that he’s getting old and the years are taking their toll. He is extremely vain, after all. Far vainer than most men, and we’re pretty vain. But even if he had the average male quotient of vanity, it wouldn’t be unnatural for him to be so dismayed by his shrinking into an old man that he’d try to hide the fact from us and from himself.

There’s a good movie from the 1990s, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, starring Richard Harris and Robert Duvall as a pair of vain old men struggling in their different ways with the loss of their strength and vitality, which is to say, struggling with their growing awareness that time is running out on them and they will die. Harris’ character is having the harder time with it.

He’s a retired seaboat captain who all his working life took great satisfaction in being bigger and stronger than his crews and whose proudest moment was the time he wrestled with Hemingway. I forget whether he beat Hemingway or if the movie even says, but he feels as if he won. Just having gone one on one with Hem was a victory in his eyes. Now, here he is, in his seventies, losing strength, losing vigor, losing confidence, and, almost hardest for him to bear, losing height.

There’s a heartbreaking scene in which, measuring himself against a door jamb, he discovers that he’s an inch shorter than the last time he measured and he lets out an anguished howl then breaks down in tears, mourning not just his diminished stature but the impending diminishment of his whole self into dust.

So I wouldn’t hold it against him if it turns out he’s lying about his height---if I thought all there was to it was a tall, vain old man’s reluctance to admit he’s getting old. I’ll get to that.

More interesting to me is that according to his medical report, Donald Trump and Colin Kaepernick are about the same height and weight. Kaepernick is six four and weighs two hundred and thirty. The President is six-three and weighs two-thirty-nine.

More people are having more fun online with that more blatant lie.

It’s not accurate to say muscle weighs more than fat. A pound is a pound. A ten pound sack of feathers weighs the same as a ten pound sack of potatoes, but the sack of feathers is going to be a whole lot harder to throw over your shoulder since it’s likely to be as big and wide as yourself. Masses of muscle, because muscle is denser, add up to a pound sooner than does fat and needs less space to do it. Or, to put it another way, you need a lot greater volume of fat to get a pound. Either way you put it, it would appear that Colin Kaepernick is all muscle while Donald Trump is all...not muscle.

I don’t care that Donald Trump is fat. Or portly or chunky or hefty or however you want to put it. I care that the President is obese because of all the health risks attendant upon obesity.

That he might keel over any moment from a heart attack or a stroke is bothersome enough. Presidents don’t have a responsibility to be skinny, but they do have a responsibility to take care of their health and that’s something Trump clearly isn’t.

But his lying about his weight infuriate me because they're another part of the con.

Trump sold himself to voters with a number of fraudulent brags and boasts. Ok, lies. The biggest one being, of course, that he was a successful businessman. But another, um, big one was that he was big. Bigger, stronger, more vigorous than all the other candidates with more stamina. That’s what “Low Energy Jeb” and “Little Marco” were about. That’s why he was always raising questions about Hillary’s health. It’s why I’m sure that if Bernie had been the nominee he’d have gone from being just “Crazy Bernie” to “Crazy Old Bernie.” Trump is the oldest man elected to a first term as president. Older even older than Reagan. Older than William Henry Harrison, and we all know what happened to him. But Trump’s boast is that he isn’t old. That is, he defies age. And in defying age, he’s defying death.

And there’s no denying it’s a sexual boast as well.

I’m fairly certain there are plenty of Trump voters who aren’t bothered by the Stormy Daniels news, who even think take it as a kind of good news.

I’m not just talking about the Our Fearless Leader Can Do No Wrong contingent of true believers---

“He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot me and he wouldn’t lose my vote. Unless of course he killed me. Which he wouldn’t. He’d just wing me. Probably only a nick in the shoulder. A flesh wound. I'd barely feel it. I’m sure he can do that. He’s probably that good a shot. Even if he’s not. Plenty of other presidents have been poor marksmen. They couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn either. He’s the best of the bad shots. And at least he knows what a barn is! Or anyway he knows farmers have them!” No other presidents did. Even the ones who were farmers.”

---and I’m not just talking about the sizable cohort who like it when he breaks rules and does what most decent people find appalling because he gets away with it. He does whatever he wants without consequence, embarrassment, or guilt.

I’m talking about people who believe that a President of the United States---a real American President---is a big, strong---white---manly man who dominates every room and intimidates them, whoever them may be, and puts them in their place with a glance and a growl, and Trump sold himself to them as the biggest, strongest, whitest, most dominant, manliest man on the field. And sexual potency is integral to that. He’s like Zeus to them in that way, still sexually dominant despite his great age and entitled to take whichever woman excites his desire because he’s Zeus. The more potentially damaging news isn’t that he paid women for sex, even though, being god-like and all, you'd think he wouldn't have to, but that he paid a woman not to reveal he isn’t really that potent and he’s bad in bed.

Trump isn’t defying age. He’s old and bald and fat. He passed a test of his cognitive abilities designed to identify incipient dementia but that doesn’t mean his cognitive skills, such as he has, aren't deteriorating. He’s slowing down mentally as well as physically and in over-compensating he’s manic, erratic, muddleheaded, and scatterbrained. And irritable. He’s a grumpy old man growing grumpier and older.

But he can’t let that show. He doesn’t dare. That’s not the product he pitched to the suckers. That’s not the product the suckers bought. If they catch on, they might ask for their money back.

That is, they might take their votes back in 2020.

If he lasts in office that long.

But if he has any hope of lasting, he has to be big, he has to be strong. He has to be in roaring good health. He has to be six-three and two thirty-nine. Like he has to be a stable genius and has to have the biggest button, he has to be as fit and powerful and indomitable as Jove, and that’s turning into a harder and harder sell.